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Michael Hogan: Slick Rick's Redemption

So this is what it's like when someone who isn't a middle-aged white guy sits in the governor's mansion. After years of being treated like a political football, the trailblazing rapper Slick Rick has been pardoned by New York Governor David Patterson.

Make no mistake: Rick, whose birth name is Ricky Walters, was wrong to shoot his cousin and an innocent bystander back in 1990. Never mind that the cousin admitted to trying to kill Rick, or that the cousin was later shot to death by an angry father after breaking into a house and raping a young boy. What's wrong is wrong, right? And it's not like Rick didn't know better:

Yeah, he shouldn't have done it. That said, Rick, who was born in England and moved to the Bronx when he was 10 years old, pled guilty and served his time, only to find himself in an immigration nightmare after briefly leaving the country in 2002 to perform on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. I.N.S. officials escorted him off the ship, which was docked in Miami, and kept him locked up for 17 months. The justification was a 1996 federal law mandating that foreign nationals convicted of felonies should be deported. It didn't matter that Rick, as one of the founding fathers of hip hop, had done more for American culture than most native-born citizens ever will. In the post-9/11 era, he was an easy target.Finally, in 2003, Judge Kimba Wood, of the Southern District of New York, ordered him released. But the government appealed that ruling, and the saga continued. (For more, read Julia Reischel's excellent article from the Village Voice.)

Governor Patterson's pardon should have the effect of ending this moronic persecution. And after decades of seeing unrepentant creeps from Richard Nixon to Marc Rich granted presidential pardons, it's pretty refreshing to see a black hip-hop pioneer get the benefit of the doubt that has traditionally been extended only to rich and powerful caucasians. Now, Governor, about those Rockefeller drug laws …